Resignation of Lucid Motors' veteran CEO spooks investor fear of new product delays
Investors dumped shares in Lucid Motors overboard after Peter Rawlinson stepped down as CEO following nearly six years at the helm, the second major C-suite reshuffling in four weeks.
On Tuesday, the Saudi-backed electric vehicle manufacturer informed investors Rawlinson, the former chief engineer for the Tesla Model S, had resigned from both his corner office job as well as his responsibility serving as chief technology officer, a position he held since 2013.
'Now that we have successfully launched the Lucid Gravity, I have decided it is finally the right time for me to step aside from my roles including CEO, CTO, and as a member of the board of directors at Lucid,' he wrote in a resignation letter included in a regulatory filing.
Standing in for Rawlinson on an interim basis, until a replacement can be found, will be operations chief Marc Winterhoff. He will have the task of more than doubling output to 20,000 vehicles from last year's 9,000 as production of the new Gravity ramps up.
Lucid had just completed its search for a new chief financial officer to replace Sherry House, who left in December 2023. Late last month, the company reported it had recently appointed Taoufiq Boussaid to the position. Now they'll have to fill the chief executive job in the coming months.
The departure of Rawlinson, who will remain an advisor to the company for the next two years, comes abruptly but shouldn't be considered a surprise. The carmaker is in the process of engineering a whole new platform, which is a lengthy, complicated, and time-consuming process. Once completed, it will underpin models slotting in below the luxury Air sedan and its SUV sibling, the Gravity, which compete with the Tesla Model S and X.
With the Gravity now launched into the market, the break in Lucid's engineering cycle serves as a natural jumping-off point—especially for someone with 13 years at the company, nearly half of which as CEO.
Bank of America analyst John Murphy warned the loss of Rawlinson is 'much more consequential than understood by the market' and could lead to future product delays and lower volumes.
He downgraded Lucid to 'underperform' from 'neutral' and slashed his price target to just $1 a share from $3 previously. Lucid traded down 12% to hit $2.30, giving it a market cap of roughly $7 billion.
In his resignation letter, Rawlinson said it was only very recently that he signed off on two of the three variants of its forthcoming platform that will underpin a $50,000 midsize car to be sold globally.
'These will now progress through to their development and industrialization phases,' he told staff.
The first cars off this platform are scheduled to start production late next year. The company did, however, take the precaution to include it in its risk report, a kind of boilerplate legal disclaimer of all the things that could go wrong.
'Our midsize platform is still in the development and/or testing phase, and may occur later than expected or not at all,' Lucid said in its annual 10-K filing.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
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